Secrets of the world's happiest cities - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/nov/01/secrets-worlds-happiest-cities-commute-property-prices <comment><USER2> Extra space, cleaner air, healthier and happier people, safer streets... Is there really any downside to banning personal cars from the city? Leave the roads for cyclists, public transportation, emergency vehicles and delivery vehicles. Suburbanites can park outside of the city can go the rest of the way via bus/train/bicycle.

[http://ecooptimism.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/bike- bus-c...](http://ecooptimism.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/bike-bus-car.jpg)

<comment><USER3> > Is there really any downside to banning personal cars from the city?

The fact that you're stomping all over a person's right to own property and use it as they wish?

Oh sure, the city will prosper as a result, but when you start making rules solely for the sake of the majority, throwing basic principles into the garbage bin, you set a precedent.

A precedent where anything that's for the greater good passes muster, regardless of anything else.

Which seems fine at first. The majority, is the majority of people right? Why not act solely in their interest?

But the truth is that we're all part of some minority or other. In some way, everyone's interests contradict the majority in some way.

If my grandma lives in the suburbs and it takes 4 hours to see her using public transportation and 30 minutes using a car ... well, you just fucked me over, didn't you? And that's just a mild example.

<comment><USER4> Any rational planning system would enhance public transport to mitigate the effects of curtailing widespread use of privately owned cars. However, you seem to be American so perhaps the notion of rational planning is alien to you. Certainly the use of verbiage like "stomping all over a person's right to own property and use it as they wish" would indicate that rational thought is alien to you.

<comment><USER5> In most towns, bus economics only allows for one hour routes and a transfer for most trips. That means two hours in motion average for a round trip, and up to two more hours waiting if your business does not line up with scheduled stops. The grandparent comment is exactly right.

Shorter, more frequent routes are possible, but making the economics work does require a ban on cars to convert drivers to paying transit riders. But most of the drivers still need cars to get to outlying areas, so they have to pay bus operations and car capital outlay. People woth modest incomes cannot afford both, so they would have to give up the car and be trapped in the denser part of the city, indeed having their personal liberties stomped on.

Autonomous taxis will rewrite the economic rules. Since they won't crash, the massive crumple zones and crush cage can be eliminated, dramatically reducing capital and operating costs. An autonomous taxi ride will likely cost less than driving your own beater.

<comment><USER3> Yours is the sole intelligent response, so I'll comment here.

> Autonomous taxis will rewrite the economic rules.

You're absolutely right.

However, that technology isn't here yet and there is no guarantee that it will arrive. Mind you, most of the barriers to adoption aren't even technical, although those exist too. I prefer not to count my chickens until they hatch.

Right now, public transportation means one thing: unions. And unions, in turn, mean: strikes, price hikes, inconsistent schedules and performance, etc.

On top of that, subway and other rail systems reach relatively few places. That means buses. And buses exacerbate the above issues to an even greater extent.

<comment><USER5> Self-driving vehicles work today and are legal in several states. Elementary pieces of self-driving tech are selling in production cars. I take it as a foregone conclusion that everything will be self-driving in 50 years—probably _much_ sooner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bogotanian here. This is one of the most unlivable cities there is. As soon as you step out the door you're aggravated in a thousands ways through your day. Bogotá and Colombia usually score high in the "happiness" rankings because of a servitude mentality that dates back to the colony. Inequality is very high even for Latin American standards and people are taught to accept and embrace it. You'll rarely see protests in this country despite the rampant corruption and nepotistic governments. People don't have the notion that democracy is supposed to empower them, and don't know things can and should be better. And of course blind catholic fanaticism only helps to keep them contained. So they think they're "happy".

<comment><USER7> I don't think the article has any intention to depict Bogotá as a happy city in absolute terms (although yeah, the author calls Peñalosa the "Mayor of Happiness"), but rather that the changes brought by its mayor in recent years have made it happiER.

I would be curious about your opinion in this sense: despite the rampant corruption and all other problems, has the city's quality of life actually improved over the past years?

<comment><USER6> Indeed, Peñalosa was an extraordinary mayor ans his transportation system improved the standard of living. But as the article hints at the end, the follow up has been terrible (e.g. one mayor indicted) and the city has gotten out of hands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I spent two days in Copenhagen over the summer for some training and I loved it. The people seemed so much more relaxed than in London or here in the US. And the bikes! They were everywhere! It was so nice :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Meanwhile my mayor declared "the war on cars is over" when he was elected. Toronto, ugh.

<comment><USER8> Is that the crack-smoking mayor? Or is that elsewhere in Canada?

<comment><USER10> yup, Mayor McCrack in Toronto. Seems like he got confused between the war on Drugs and the war on Cars...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article mentions something along the lines of people who walk to work are happier than if they drove to work.

I wonder how remote working from home compares in happiness to walking to a separate but nearby place of work?

When I've worked from home for sustained periods, I've felt happier when taking regular walks than if I stay indoors all day. I've found walking before the work day starts to be the most beneficial (just around the block for 5-15 mins). I tried this after a remote working friend recommended it (and his remote working neighbour had recommended it to him IIRC).

I wonder if any of you who home work have found the same or otherwise?

<comment><USER8> I work from home 100% of the time (I live in the US and have a client here and a client in Norway). I absolutely love it and I don't think I could ever go back to working in an office.

I have time to spend with my dogs, take them out and keep them exercised. I have time to spend with my wife and we only have to keep up one car.

I work just as efficiently, if not more so, than when I worked in an office setting through tech like Skype, Screenhero, email, and just basic phone calls. And we use task management apps like Zendesk to help coordinate between our team and other teams. It's really very smooth and efficient.

I do get a little cabin-feverish sometimes, but then I just spend an hour outside with my dogs, or my wife and I go on a day trip to and catch some theater or something, and I'm ready to get back to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Downtown Bogota at night was one of the scariest places I've ever been.

On the flip-side, Bogota itself is awesome, made more awesome by Colombians, who are also double awesome!

<comment><USER13> I love Colombia and the Colombians but Bogota is one of my least favourite places in the world. Most Colombians would agree, I think. Traffic is horrible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This was a very interesting article but the evidence presented was especially weak.

I was particularly unimpressed by "Bogotá's fortunes have since declined. The TransMilenio system is plagued by desperate crowding as its private operators fail to add more capacity – yet more proof that robust public transport needs sustained public investment." It seems like any outcome is evidence for the authors views.

</comment><comment><USER15> Oddly enough, I opened this up expecting an article on Thimphu.

</comment><comment><USER16> The car is a textbook case of catastrophically bad scaling. For sporadic use (errands, long trips, leisure) it's amazing. For daily commuting (60 miles per day, plus parking) it's horrible. Space-consuming, polluting, expensive (except cheap relative to, e.g., Amtrak because no one uses the latter) and unsafe when abused to the point that cars are (operated while drunk, while seriously ill, or at unreasonable speeds given congestion).

The problem is that people, individually, don't want to give up the freedom. It's "other drivers" that are the problem. Add to this the fact that so few people _can_ use other means of transportation-- those have fallen into ruin.

<comment><USER17> Don't forget the perverse incentives of mandated "free" parking, resulting in every pedestrian, cyclist, and transit user subsidizing everyone who parks somewhere (in addition to the horrible sprawl effects).

<comment><USER18> Exactly. Even in places that are generally enamoured with free markets, you never see this. It would be fun to see market-priced parking in places like Manhattan - what would happen?

<comment><USER19> Parking is not market-priced in Manhattan? Are there any major cities where it is free?

When I lived in Chicago it certainly wasn't. Parking in the Loop was $10-$20/day (this was 15 years ago) if you just did it ad-hoc, you could buy monthly passes and save a bit, but it certainly wasn't free and as far as I know it wasn't subsidized.

All the extra taxes, costs, and inconvenience of owning a car in an major urban area is one of the big reasons why I will never live in such a place again.

<comment><USER20> Here in Munich, Germany you pay something like 6-10 EUR to park in the city centre for the time you're working, that is 8-10h. There are still some free spots, the more you leave the center, the more easily you find them. Less than 10 years ago it was much easier to find a free one in the center as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wrote a related article about a year ago that discusses a major threat to Canada's identity: A Big Reason Canadians are so Happy (and Why it's at Risk): [http://allsprawldown.com/activism/a-big-reason-canadians- are...](http://allsprawldown.com/activism/a-big-reason-canadians-are-so-happy- and-why-its-at-risk/)</comment>


Google Chrome, Chromium, Gears, V8 & Blob API - <AUTHOR> http://www.mydigitallife.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1040598&Itemid=43

<comment><USER2> This author could have written this article about any of the current crop of browsers. I mean, tabs, status bar, and history--wow, no other browsers ever had those! Oh, wait..</comment>


Innovative Techniques to Simplify Sign Ups and Logins - <AUTHOR> http://uxmovement.com/forms/innovative-techniques-to-simplify-sign-ups-and-logins

<comment><USER2> Effectively the same as submitted yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2517296>

Much discussion there.</comment>


If I could amend PEP 8 - <AUTHOR> https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/if-i-could-amend-pep-8 <comment><USER2> With regards to string quotes, I've always used this idiom, which I find fantastic:

For strings that are meant for human consumption, use double quotes, otherwise use single quotes.

This is super practical when looking strings meant for translation, end-user formatting, and such.

<comment><USER3> I love this. I've always followed this guideline without thinking about how to communicate it.

I'm fairly sure that single quotes are much more common in the UK in literature, though, so this only feels like it makes sense to NA and AU speakers.

<comment><USER4> > _I 'm fairly sure that single quotes are much more common in the UK in > literature, though_

It's just that the primary/secondary role is reversed. (This is also reflected in which one you have to hold Shift for on a computer keyboard.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't agree with allowing characters to go over 80 - there is rarely a time the code can't be broken down to fit.

80 characters helps a lot since you can count on all code to fit within a certain area - so you can run three side/side text buffers in your text editor, instead of two with lots of useless white space because a few lines might be too long.

Doing a simple overview of the requests library, most of the lines over 80 characters are just laziness such as:

[https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/blob/master/tests/t...](https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/blob/master/tests/test_utils.py#L153)

And a few of the actual potential cases for going over 80 characters can still be broken down without losing any readability:

[https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/blob/master/request...](https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/blob/master/requests/auth.py#L105)

              r.headers['Proxy-Authorization'] = _basic_auth_str(self.username,
                                                                 self.password)

<comment><USER6> I have lots of classes and method names that are descriptive but also make 80 chars harder to read. In past I've had to sacrifice readibility to follow strict 80 char limit rule it is a bad idea to enforce it. 99% of time you are not doing merges that require you to have 3 side by side buffers. It makes no sense to point this as the main reason to maintain the limit in my opinion. 100 char limit is way more sane, 95% of time 79 is enough for me but for the remaining 5% to enforce it means to actually make it less readable or make more cryptic variable names which is even worse imo..

<comment><USER5> I like descriptive names too, EvenToThePointOfAbsurdity, but if the 80 char limit is starting to be imposing, it's usually an indication that code should be refactored as it's being indented too much, or one thing is trying to do too many things.

3 side/side buffers is arbitrary, (it would be 2 on a small laptop display) - and maybe that's why I like 80 characters, it lets me develop on any screen without needing more real estate because the files are long.

I mean Angular has iirc 120 characters, and if you take a look at an average source file eg:

[https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/master/modules/%40an...](https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/master/modules/%40angular/http/src/headers.ts)

You'll see a ton of white space after 80 characters that is 'wasted' \- this also eats up into horizontal real estate of another buffer which in the end means you actually have less information on the screen with >80 characters rather than more.

In all cases - the code in that file could easily be broken into multiple lines and not lose _any_ readability.

<comment><USER4> > * 3 side/side buffers is arbitrary, (it would be 2 on a small laptop > display) *

It's about 1/3 of my 13" 2013 Macbook Air - the other 2/3 is usually a browser.

It's also not even about how much horizontal space there is for any reason - it just scans better if you keep it narrower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this concern over an absolute limit on line length is overblown. Where I work now, we don't use a hard limit on line length. The rule is "keep it readable." That usually means lines less than 100 characters. I try to keep it below 80 myself, but I wouldn't complain about a 120 character line.

I did a search through our codebase for line lengths over 80 or 100 characters and found remarkably few. Most were comment lines.

</comment><comment><USER8> In situations where the language allows either quote, I think any ounce of time spent by anyone debating to use one or the other is pure waste, including this comment.

Just do whatever you feel like. If your editor, linter, or review process makes you change it, those things are broken.

<comment><USER9> Inconsistency is not the end of the world but it hurts readability, slightly complicates find/replace and I find it just ugly.

The fact that the codes works is most important, but being nice to work on comes a close second.

<comment><USER10> Code that doesn't work but is readable can at least be fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Agreed, "aligned with opening delimiter" is brain dead, you just waste time re-justify everything if you refactor. It's just more effort in the long run, and for what? It isn't prettier, more readable, or more convenient.

As for strings, meh. But consistency is nice. Line length exceeding an arbitrary standard, fine. Rules can be broken if there's a good reason.

<comment><USER12> > Agreed, "aligned with opening delimiter" is brain dead,

As a smug lisp weenie that has been working in python for many years, I completely disagree with this.

> you just waste time re-justify everything if you refactor.

A single `indent-region` in emacs and you are rejustified, no trouble.

> It's just more effort in the long run, and for what?

It's more effort as opposed to what, exactly?

> It isn't prettier, more readable, or more convenient.

It is, to me, prettier, but I think, objectively, it is more readable than alternatives, especially if there is any kind of nesting involved.

I concede that if there is nesting involved, you might be bumping into other python style issues, and generally might want to add some intermediate variables, etc; however, I do believe that in at least some cases this is entirely inconvenient, and so the lisp way of aligning parameters with their delimiter is the way to go in those cases. Anything else would be quite a bit less readable.

<comment><USER11> > > you just waste time re-justify everything if you refactor.

> A single `indent-region` in emacs and you are rejustified, no trouble.

Because when you refactor the function/class name, it's never just one region. So now you have to go back and indent all occurrences, maybe even over multiple files. Brilliant!

<comment><USER13> > Because when you refactor the function/class name, it's never just one > region

... the region is whatever you say it is:

      (mark-whole-buffer)
      (indent-region)

Or, most likely, something like: C-x h TAB

I don't think that's particularly onerous.

It's only a few lines of elisp to visit all the files in a tree and automatically format them. That said, it would probably be more sensible to modify whatever refactoring tool to be indentation aware, if it isn't already. Again, that's easy to do with elisp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The one I don't like is the asymmetrical block-quotes in docstrings:

"""This line doesn't start at the start.

But this one does, and the following one ends at the start.

"""

<comment><USER15> Yeah, agreed. My multiline strings (docstring or otherwise) almost always look like

        """\
        This line starts at the start.
        And so do the following ones.
        """

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For me having to read even the ugliest code is better than having to horizontally scroll. Anyone who thinks there is a single one line of code for which it's legit to go beyond 80 characters is either masochist or using a view with more than 80 characters in available width.

</comment><comment><USER17> I use a proportional font so it's hard to know where the 80th character is. I just try to be reasonable. Btw, proportional fonts look much better. It took a week to adapt.

What I'll amend is the rule about not having spaces around = in argument lists. It looks horrible and it induces some people at omitting spaces in assignments. I've never seen so many var=value in source code as in Python, since the time of PHP.

</comment><comment><USER18> Personally, I would have hard time with single quotes point.

Double quotes are just so much easier to catch visually.

<comment><USER9> Not with color syntax highlighting. I find double quotes unnecessary noise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How do they suggest you indent function arguments? The Javascript way? Because I don't like that one at all.

<comment><USER20> This is my preference for function calls and defs that get too long, usually due to indentation or whatever.

      function_call(
          arg1, arg2, arg3
      )

      def function_call(
          arg1, arg2, arg3
      ):
          pass

<comment><USER19> noooo

):

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >Line-length can exceed 79 characters, to 100, when convenient.

My issue with this is that, in reality, everything will now be 100 chars.

<comment><USER22> There are actually few places where lines need to be this long. If you keep indentation low (by refactoring) most of the lines don't get to 80.</comment></comment>


The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7 <comment><USER3> I've enjoyed watching the Bitcoin experiment. It's been enlightening in a variety of ways, from technically to socially.

I've been fascinated and appalled in equal measure at the fanboy community, at the intolerance of criticism that sprang up very quickly, and how strong feelings ran (likely because of financial investment in the tech).

It's also been interesting watching it go from simple CPU mining, to multiple GPU rigs in dorm rooms, all the way through FPGA and then to massive installations of custom ASIC miners.

But I've always hoped it wouldn't go mainstream for two reasons - <USER2> supply with weighting in favour of early adopters, and the massive electricity costs of the 'mining' and transaction validation process. Scalable, competitive proof of work systems for a widespread currency are an ecological disaster in the making, and deflationary currency with a handful of early users controlling a huge proportion of the total currency supply... these aren't "features".

I'll be very interested in what happens next, and for the reasons given I hope it's not just a BTC clone with better governance.

<comment><USER4> I 'll also notice what the whole experiment proved: That money can perverse moral incentives. The electricity/wasted energy issue you mention is just one of them. The amount of time spent on building and specializing the hardware is another. All this was in the hope of the abstract goal of creating money, not wealth. People weren't so zealous in building specialized hardware for, say, protein folding. Bitcoin advocates usually put forward "the good of humanity" argument, yet the product by design puts individual interests above all other interests.

<comment><USER5> In that vein, I'd like to point out Gridcoin[1], a crypto-currency that rewards you for throwing your computing power at a BOINC project (basically scientific data crunching) [2] instead of wasting it on pointlessly solving crypto problems. It's certainly not perfect, but an interessting idea nonetheless.

[1] [http://gridcoin.us/](http://gridcoin.us/) [2] [http://boinc.berkeley.edu/](http://boinc.berkeley.edu/)

<comment><USER3> That's quite cool, I like that idea a lot more. I think I'd still rather a currency that didn't rely on burning power as fast as possible, but using that power for good is, well, good :)

<comment><USER6> Well, there needs to be some proof of work, something that is hard to do at scale but easy for individuals.

To that degree, Bitcoin has failed, because massive SHA256 crunching is now easy to do at scale and hard for individuals.

More varied challenges, like BOINC, or PoW that is bandwidth, connectivity, latency, or disk-space based, will provide a lot more value to the community and make it easier for individuals to contribute. I eagerly await the day that one of these alternatives becomes mainstream.

<comment><USER3> Alternatives are good but.... well, disk-space based would push up the price of hard drives. Bandwidth connectivity and latency could again be owned by big players...

I don't know. What I do know is that in a centralised crypto-currency system you don't need any of this as the issuing authority merely signs the transactions and we're away. I hope that some bright spark comes up with a way to make a decentralised one almost as simple...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Doesn't this all seem a bit dramatic? Throwing away the baby with the bathwater? Cryptocurrency is still in its infancy, and BitCoin is the first cryptocurrency. It's a little early to declare the project a "failure," throw up your hands and walk out of the room, just because a few people haven't acknowledged the urgency of a (very fixable) technical problem.

People disagree about the reality of global warming. Does that mean we throw out the entire system of laws of the United States and other world powers because it hasn't yet addressed this problem?

This is exactly why I never bought the concept of BitCoin as a 'libertarian' currency. There's always politics, there's always governance. It becomes political as soon as more than one person is involved. And as soon as it's political, institutions, processes, procedures, and laws become necessary - also known as "government."

I still believe in BitCoin, however. Ultimately, there's a way out of this tangle, and like with most political problems, it's a political solution. BitCoin will either adapt and scale up or stay the same and scale (way) down.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure why you think bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency, things like digicash existed since the early 90s. In any case, did you even read the post? The author explicitly describes the failings of bitcoin's political processes. His concerns weren't some hypothetical issues of ideology, they were concrete examples of how those who control bitcoin are preventing it from growing in a very technical sense, and refuse to engage in any sort of compromise because it's not within their (business) interests.

edit: To clarify, I'm not trying to say I agree or disagree with the author, as I don't know anywhere near enough about the bitcoin community to say either way. I'm merely pointing out that the OP was talking past the author's points, not addressing them. (In particular, they built a strawman against governance and political solutions.)

<comment><USER7> Ok, I'll add some modifiers: BitCoin is the first global peer-to-peer distributed cryptocurrency actually in use.

And yes, I did read it.

Step A is realizing that the political processes aren't working, and Step B is figuring out a way to make them work. Step B is not throwing up your hands and quitting.

<comment><USER9> Mike Hearn has been doing all the quite politicking, technical writing, code prototyping, message board and mailing list discussion, and etc that you would expect a mature OSS project to require to do a technically contentious change. He lost the argument, decisively, but not for lack of trying reasonable steps. This is not Step A nor Step B. This is not even Step F ("fork the codebase and network with the idea of forcing Bitcoin Core to accept a new ground truth"), which he and collaborators tried unsuccessfully. Quitting is Step Q.

It may be helpful in evaluating the above to note that I'm an open and notorious critic of Bitcoin and believe efforts to save it are poorly advised, but I'll happily function as a world-readable notary to say "Yep he really did try doing that; I watched it happen."

<comment><USER7> Either way it will be left to people other than Hearn to decide. I admire Hearn for his very many hours spent on this seemingly intractable problem, and I understand his frustration. I just think it's premature to declare this undertaking a failure.

XT may still be the go-to option when scale and transaction bandwidth actually starts being an existential problem.

You'll find that people rarely react as urgently as they need to until the problem starts making their wallet lighter. But for the last year Bitcoin has increased both in popularity and price. And even at their slowest, _actual settlement times of transferring monetary value_ on the BitCoin network are still lifetimes faster than clearances on ACH or other traditional financial networks, which means Bitcoin still has a competitive advantage over the traditional financial system. When that competitive advantage starts going away, I have an intuition that the block size will suddenly increase. I don't know for sure, but I have a feeling.

<comment><USER10> Given that XT was met with outright censorship, DDoS attacks, and other unethical and criminal behavior, I don't see what else you'd expect him to do.

<comment><USER7> And yet I can still go to Bitcoin XT repository, download it and run it if I wish: [https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt](https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt)

That's the genius of it all. Even the governing body doesn't prevent people from running the existing patches. As soon as the impasse becomes an existential threat, we already have a solution, and anyone who wants to run it can run it. Downloading and running the new Bitcoin is kind of like voting.

<comment><USER11> If you want to be DDOSed, sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great summary of the current state of bitcoin.

In the conclusion he states: "<i>Even if a new team was built to replace Bitcoin Core, the problem of mining power being concentrated behind the Great Firewall would remain.</i>"

Bitcoin's decentralized nature encourages power pool formation by promoting economies of scale. It is not surprising that like the production of electronics, clothing, toys, etc. the lowest cost center is in China.

<comment><USER13> I think he is kind of burying the lead here. The major development in Bitcoin in the past week is that several crucial players came together to form Bitcoin Classic.[0]

They have the trifecta of a majority of mining power, two of the largest exchanges, and several key developers on board. More importantly the miners supporting the project are in agreement on increasing the block size. It goes a long way to addressing most of the things Mike brings up in this post.

Mike's done a lot of Bitocin particularly by bringing to light the issues with Bitcoin core. At the same time this post strikes me as alarmist. It seems more like a rationalization of his decision than anything else.

[0] [https://bitcoinclassic.com/](https://bitcoinclassic.com/)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for reading the article. I mentioned Classic briefly at the end. I did not dwell on it because it is simply repeating the same process as XT went through.

When we were preparing for XT, we also went and talked to the Chinese miners. They told us that the original 20mb limit Gavin proposed was too high, but that they could accept 8mb. So we compromised and went with 8 + a growth function. Then after XT was launched they changed their mind and said any growth after 8 at all was totally unacceptable. Now they're telling the Classic guys that 2 is the most they could handle. Did the Chinese internet border really get 4x worse in the span of 3 months? I doubt it.

Western miners aren't much better. One told me quite clearly they'd start voting for BIP101 back in November (though: voting in such a way that it wouldn't actually activate!). But they didn't. When I followed up, they again said it was on their todo list and they'd start really soon. But they didn't.

The miners have proven over and over again that what they say they will accept and what they actually do accept is not aligned. So right now I'm seeing some excitement (maybe more like desperate hope) that Bitcoin Classic will solve anything. Maybe now the "Scaling Bitcoin" conferences have come and gone and Core's reputation is much worse, they'll have better luck, but even then the _best case scenario_ is that Bitcoin gets a 2mb limit. That isn't nearly enough and big backlogs will still occur.

More to the point, even in the best case scenario, the community will essentially accept that Bitcoin is controlled by the Chinese government and grows or shrinks at their whim.

<comment><USER15> To be fair, 8mb and 8mb doubling every two years are two very different things. I understand why 8mb with doubling was offered, but I also understand why the chinese miners expressed their concerns, concerns which you were unwilling to address.

I supported BIP101, but your unwillingness to compromise - they offered 4mb doubling every 4 years I believe - played a great part in it's eventual failure.

The situation now is very much different with almost 100% of miners saying they will support 2mb and some 50% already supporting bitcoin classic with more to come.

So, I share your concerns, but unfortunately mistakes were made, some of them grave mistakes, mistakes from which we learned, and are thus now well placed to move forward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Mike's resolution was apparently to join up with a consortium of banks back in November:

[http://bravenewcoin.com/news/30-top-banks-and-mike-hearn- hav...](http://bravenewcoin.com/news/30-top-banks-and-mike-hearn-have-now- joined-r3-global-consortium/)

Read the article, he was clearly laying the groundwork for this move back in Thanksgiving.

"The current Bitcoin system, I mean the system we actually use today with the block chain, isn't going to change the world at all due to the 1mb limit. … So if I have a choice between helping the existing financial system build something better than what they have today that resembles Bitcoin, or helping the Bitcoin community build something worse than what they have today that resembles banking, then I may as well go where the users are and work with the banks."

<comment><USER17> Whether or not Mike might profit from Bitcoin failing (in favor of the alternate cryptocurrencies he works with), the picture he paints is one of inherent instability, mismanagement, and censorship, and it seems like a solid argument. I'm skeptical of where his money comes from, and I don't think he's unbiased enough that I would short BTC just on this article alone. But I'm certainly less bullish on its future than I was.

<comment><USER18> Which alternate cryptocurrencies is he working with?

<comment><USER17> See link in the GP:

"The use cases they are looking at and requirements they have cannot be met with the Bitcoin protocol, it just doesn't have the things they need. They are actually spending a lot more time looking at Ethereum than Bitcoin, as it's more obvious how to apply it to their use cases."

<comment><USER18> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What I take from this (and I think I really should invest my own time in researching more on) is psychology.

People want to protect their investments. But because we are talking about money, don't confuse this for meaning that the investments are just about money.

Investments in code contributions, investments in all the articles read, investments in community, friends, social networking, investments in belief systems, investment in the justification for choosing one thing rather than another.

It's simply not consistent to say "oh you only have 20BTC, so you've nothing to lose" or "oh, you made no code contributions, so why are you complaining" as both ignore the potential for massive psychological and personal investments.

All these investments act as a barrier to change. It hurts, it hurts physically to lose big investments.

There is a cost benefit analysis that humans perform internally. Is the hurt of losing this investment now worse than the pain by keeping the investment later.

If we go back to the article, we see Mike repeatedly tell us that Bitcoin is an experiment. He is saying to us now "look, don't invest your time, effort and money into it" \- and he is telling himself "I have made the change, I have accepted a loss by investing so much of my time and effort into this, and am moving on".

</comment><comment><USER20> I have always felt that Bitcoin was doomed to this sort of fate, for the simple fact that the "specification" for the Bitcoin protocol was "whatever Satoshi's client does". The community repeatedly failed to encourage a diversity of implementations, and as a result they effectively ceded control of Bitcoin to the maintainers of the one and only implementation.

By the time independent implementations did begin to develop, it was too late to introduce diversity into the ecosystem.

The result is what we are now seeing.

<comment><USER21> >for the simple fact that the "specification" for the Bitcoin protocol was "whatever Satoshi's client does"

Fully agreed. The largest failure of the so-called "developers" (pretenders after Satoshi) of Bitcoin have failed to concentrate their efforts on understanding and specifying Satoshi's code.

The original Satoshi bitcoin implementation is a mess of Boost-y C++ that was clearly written by a bright guy who was steeped in mediocre C++ programming (probably on Windows). Studying the code and writing a proper specification is job number one. Adding random new features onto Bitcoin without first understanding the codebase is simply juvenile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So this is a political problem -- here's my prediction of what will happen (given that we live in the real, political, world).

A political entity -- not necessary a sovereign government, but perhaps a bank or financial institution -- will offer a currency swap to existing blockchain holders to adopt _their_ crypto currency. The inducement will be a limited time window to put in your claim, with all unclaimed but mined numbers going to the financial entity to reward their followers or stakeholders.

In the real world, this is called escheat and it is a power of the crown. Bitcoin is essentially a system for recording deeds to digital land. They aren't making more numbers, so the problem is the political resolution of competing claims to the same resource. This sort of claim comes, in the end, to a network consensus of who is the sovereign.

<comment><USER9> Ethereum is one prominent example of this: we'll swap currency on your blockchain for currency on our blockchain, ours will totally be worth more due to enhanced features.

 _They aren 't making more numbers_

"We can conveniently restrict the supply of numbers" is one of the fundamental failures of the imagination among Bitcoin enthusiasts. "There's only 21 million. Trust us. We counted." "But couldn't I make a new 21 million with a one character code change?" "Well yeah but they'd be so much less cool than our 21 million and you'd have to convince people to use them." "But wouldn't I be able to use the Satoshi adoption strategy -- give them away for cheap to bootstrap a distributed boiler room then gradually make them more expensive, enriching early participants in the scheme at the expense of later participants?" "But that's crazy, it will never work. Nobody wants worthless currency units tied to a transaction network that provides absolutely no value. They want spendable money." "Of course people want worthless currency units tied to a transaction network that provides absolutely no value, if they have the expectation that they will not be the last people to want those currency units. That describes why you invested in Bitcoin!"

<comment><USER23> You can restrict the supply within a single system, and value follows the network effect due to fear and greed.

[https://coinmarketcap.com/](https://coinmarketcap.com/) lists 650 alternate value storages which take up 650 million dollars. Bitcoin alone takes six _billion_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The problem is incentivizing people to "mine". This effectively created a pyramid scheme where the "first in" benefit from the "later in" spending money.

Bitcoin will be more interesting to me once the mining pool is exhausted. At that point, we'll see how much of Bitcoin's value is in _use_ instead of _speculation_.

<comment><USER25> Having a limited supply of money encourages hoarding. Hoarding does not an economy make. Bitcoin would fail there too.

<comment><USER21> So an economy requires money in unlimited supply? That seems like dubious sophistry.

<comment><USER26> I'm not an economist, but I suppose that yes, in a sense it's true. An economy requires the value of money to be stable or very slowly decreasing in time. To obtain this, the amount of money in circulation must roughly match the amount of wealth. Since wealth is usually increasing, so has to be the total amount of money for its value to remain stable.

<comment><USER21> It just strikes me as silly that an economy "requires" an infinite supply of money. I realize this is a commonly held belief, but I think it is wrong.

<comment><USER27> If you want an economy that encourages investment and trade then you want people to have some inherent motivation to spend money rather than hold on to it. The easiest way to do this is by introducing small amounts of inflation. At the very least we know that more people are being produced in the world, and people desire money, so merely by the practice of reproduction we are creating more demand for the same amount of money over time.

<comment><USER21> It's a nice story, but it's unconvincing. I would agree that a fixed supply of money might become more valuable as human population increases.

But I'm utterly unconvinced that 'prices can only increase' for the economy to work. For example, in electronics prices for hardware have generally fallen in nominal and real terms and yet it's still a pretty big industry.

<comment><USER26> "Nice story": it's not like I'm making up stories to convince people.

Think of a house: would you buy one if you knew that just by waiting a year its price would be 80% of what it is now? And the year after 65%? You'd probably just wait. If you waited long enough, you could buy one for, literally, today's peanuts.

Electronics sounds like a good counterexample, but electronics are also developing at extremely high speed. The price of a given device decreases very rapidly in time, but new more powerful devices come on the market every day. Sure, you could have waited five years to buy an iPhone 1, but that piece of electronics is now almost worthless compared to the other options you have on the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The folly of BitCoin is to believe that technical problems are somehow orthogonal to social problems. They never are. And never has this been more true in the history of our species than with the technology of money. Money is an artifact of the state; always has been, always will.

<comment><USER28> _> Money is an artifact of the state; always has been always will._

Nothing can be further from the truth. You don't have to go too far for the example. Cigarettes in prisons are used as money. People use all sorts of things as money. State wants to control it because it wants to collect some of the value produced by other people. That is all. Bitcoin is about not giving states these powers.

<comment><USER29> > Cigarettes in prisons are used as money.

No. That's barter. Money has very specific characteristics. Cigarettes in prison fail these three: divisibility, durability and uniformity.

[https://www.stlouisfed.org/education/economic-lowdown- podcas...](https://www.stlouisfed.org/education/economic-lowdown-podcast- series/episode-9-functions-of-money)

<comment><USER30> Cigarettes have all those properties, just somewhat imperfectly. Cartons are divisble to packs which are divisible to individual cigarettes. Cigarettes are pretty durable - if you don't get them wet and avoid breaking them they have a reasonably long shelf life. And they are pretty uniform in each division - carton, pack, cigarette. Since prisons allow prisoners to smoke cigarettes they have the cover of utility while being used as money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I love this summary, it really touches on all the core issues. However, even though bitcoin has such severe flaws, I think that cryptocurrency in general is still really promising. I've been particularly excited about ethereum for the past two years or so, and progress on that project definitely seems to be happened (although it's not a currency per se). The concept of the block chain still has massive potential.

<comment> TD-Linux Indeed, it seems really early to throw away blockchains because one change to the consensus rules for the Bitcoin blockchain ended up not being popular. There's still tons of other unexplored space on the Bitcoin chain itself, not even counting altcoins - there's a lot of flexibility with Bitcoin script, and new opcodes are being added (OP_CLTV got turned on very recently).

Some of these allow you to develop altcoins that are backed by Bitcoin, called sidechains (see Elements Alpha for an example [1]). There's other clever ways to use the scripting system to do fancy things that could help lower the cost of transactions, like the Lightning network [2].

[1] [https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements](https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements)

[2] [http://lightning.network/](http://lightning.network/)

<comment><USER31> I've never seen Elements Alpha or heard of sidechains, that's a really interesting project! Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Its no surprise that mining power is concentrated[1]. Activities across populations tend to have a power law distribution[2]

[1] [https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC](https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC) (scroll to "Pool Distribution", today more than half the mining capacity is in two pools)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rank- size_distribution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rank-size_distribution):

"The rank-size rule (or law), describes the remarkable regularity in many phenomena, including the distribution of city sizes, the sizes of businesses, the sizes of particles (such as sand), the lengths of rivers, the frequencies of word usage, and wealth among individuals. All are real-world observations that follow power laws"

<comment><USER33> People breathe, people have shoes, people have cars, people have toothbrushes, people have phones, people have email addresses, people work, ... must be something else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This may be naive but why can't Bitcoin fork? Forks historically produced better results.

Why would switching to a cryptocurrency that is better designed be a bad thing?

<comment><USER35> Bitcoin did fork. That is what Bitcoin XT was. Every major operator of Bitcoin XT nodes got systemically DDoSed, including Coinbase, until participation died down. There are concerted efforts to prevent blocksize expansion.

Additionally, admins at most major bitcoin news sites censored or banned users discussing it.

Switching to another cryptocurrency is a whole different can of worms - remember, btc right now costs around $420 a coin, and all that value is because of the total sum of people invested in it. No other cryptocurrency has anything close to the btc market cap, so capital fleeing the bitcoin blockchain may not trust alternative ones that are much smaller. The problem with bitcoin _right now_ is that mining power is majority controlled by a very small group of people, and any other competitive cryptocurrency is much more at risk for whales taking control.

<comment><USER36> > mining power is majority controlled by a very small group of people

what can change to make this better? Because it seems the root of the problem is that some small group of people managed to amass a large amount of hardware.

<comment><USER35> A large part of the problem is again a flaw in bitcoin itself. SHA256 mining is extremely GPU unfriendly by design, whereas most other cryptocurrencies use scrypt which is much more applicable to the GPU model. As a result, ASIC hardware to do SHA hashes to compute blocks in bitcoin became by far the most efficient hardware to mine bitcoin, but because it is custom it requires a ton of money to fabricate. So you see hundred million dollar mining operations emerge because only they can afford the fab run on a custom PCB to do SHA256 hashes.

In theory, Litecoin would not have the same pandemic ASIC runaway market control problem. GPUs would still moderately competitive, and act as a counterbalance that normal users have available to them to mine. There would _be_ custom scrypt hardware, certainly, but it would most likely not have the insane performance advantage over general purpose computers that SHA algorithms have.p

To fix bitcoin itself, you need to commoditize the hashing hardware used by the best in the industry. If everyone had access to the ASIC's bitfury were using at reasonable prices normal people could afford, people could distribute the mining more, but as it is most of these vendors are using in house solutions that dramatically outperform off the shelf bitcoin mining hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is Mike Hearn.

[http://plan99.net/~mike/](http://plan99.net/~mike/)

</comment><comment><USER37> What if the pro-fork community wanted to buy their way to the raised thresholds?

So we're at what, 0.9 Exahash?[1]

Say you want to force the change. You'd need to add three times that, or 2.7 EHash/s.[1]

Let's say you buy a ton of AntMiners to cover that, at 3.3 GHash/s/$.[2]

So that's a paltry, what... $820 Million?

Less if you just buy the factory in Shenzhen.

Basically just one winning Powerball ticket though.

[1] [http://bitcoin.sipa.be/](http://bitcoin.sipa.be/)

[2] [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#cite_n...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#cite_note- AntMinerS5Plus-7)

Caveat emptor: my ability to eyeball math in the peta-exa-yotta range is spotty at best. These results may be off by a factor of... any factor.

<comment> TD-Linux You can't actually just buy your way to the raised thresholds. Blocks greater than 1MB are invalid according to the current Bitcoin Core consensus rules, and will be rejected.

<comment><USER37> You mean they'll be rejected by the minority of miners who voted no?

Because if so, it sounds like you can buy your way to raised thresholds.

EDIT:

Oh, I see... Can you really call it a main branch if you just added all the capacity that is immediately forked? Or is it really just an independent unrelated project at that point?

Let me lay those semantic issues to rest by noting that my original post was not in any way a serious proposal. I was just thinking through the implications of a few individuals with fiat over the voting.

<comment> TD-Linux Yeah, the questions in regard to post-hardfork haven't been definitively answered yet because Bitcoin has never intentionally hardforked before. It has done once in the past due to a software error [1], and it was nearly a disaster but luckily all the right people were online and quickly decided which fork to keep.

[1] [https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawi...](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawiki)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Related NY Times article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904397)

<comment><USER39> Since we probably shouldn't have two articles about this on the front page, and the current one is the original source, I guess we'll treat the NYT piece as the dupe.

(We plan to build something to aggregate URLs so this will become less of an issue.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Look at the people who derive their influence from the Bitcoin ecosystem. Do you agree with their views? Do you find them generally friendly? Are you happy giving them more power by buying Bitcoin? This was what made me stay out of Bitcoin.

<comment><USER41> I am confused as to what you are referring to? I am not deeply involved with Bitcoin and I don't live in the valley so maybe I am missing something. The only real view I have noticed people universally share in the bitcoin scene seems to be the need for a decentralize currency. Can you elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Bitcoin was always going to fail because even as a technically competent guy, I could never understand, nor be bothered to understand how the damn thing worked.

There was no way in hell a normal, non-tech guy could ever understand it enough to use it everyday.

This was a case of tech folks missing the woods for the trees. Even this article will go way over the heads of 99% of people on the planet.

Why would you go through all that pain when cash is everywhere, easy to access, and easy to understand?

<comment><USER43> I have to admit, even as a technically competent guy with secondary school economics and a lifelong interest in economics, I have a hard time understanding the monetary system. I don't think people not understanding things fully is an adequate explanation for failure. As Milton Friedman is said to have said, "nobody knows how to make a pencil". Nobody fully understands any system they use, the world is just too complex for that. All they really need to know is how to use a system to get the results they want. By this measure, government issued money is very easy.

<comment><USER42> The problem is that we use the monetary system right from childhood. We are born in it. There's no need to learn it at all.

Asking someone in their 20s or 30s to learn a completely new monetary system, one built on things as "obscure" (to the lay person) as bits and bytes - well, that's asking a bit too much.

The current monetary system might be confusing if you dig in, but its implementation is ridiculously simple.

<comment><USER44> It's not simple. Everyday usage is to an extent, but the system is actually very complicated.

The same can be said of Bitcoin though. Everyday usage is simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> If bitcoin is such a disaster why is BTC price holding firm or even increasing?

<comment><USER46> Because it's not. Most commenters here forget that bitcoin is not a fixed thing. It evolves. It forks.

All kinds of famous/important people predict Bitcoin's death every week, but it just keeps going.

<comment><USER47> Bitcoin forking is generally considered an Extremely Bad Thing To Happen.

<comment><USER48> It has happened before with emergency fixes....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Just when I was halfway through explaining byzantine fault tolerance to my dad.

</comment><comment><USER50> If I were so inclined, I would infer that sabotage is taking place. Taken from the sabotage expert's manual (page 6):

"Simple sabotage is more than malicious mischlef,and it should always consist ,of acts whose results will be detrimental to the materials and man- power or the enemy"

[https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story- archive/...](https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story- archive/2012-featured-story-archive/CleanedUOSSSimpleSabotage_sm.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER51> Disclaimer: I know very little about the bitcoin community.

It seems like the quotation, "One of the great things about Bitcoin is its lack of democracy" is grossly out of context. In the original comment, by the person that @octskyward is talking about, it seems to be referring to the fact that it is not a majority rules democracy.

edit: grammar

<comment><USER52> What other kind of democracy is there? If there's a binary decision to be made (i.e. increase the block chain or not) anything other than majority rules fails to resolve the issue.

<comment><USER51> I suppose what I meant is this, when someone is quoted as saying something is "not a democracy" most people read it (or at least what I first read it as was) as meaning it is an autocracy, whereas the point that theymos (referred to as the person that @octskyward was talking about in my parent post) was making is that anyone can do something if they want, even if it goes against the majority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> > Allowed buyers to take back payments they'd made after walking out of shops, > by simply pressing a button (if you aren't aware of this "feature" that's > because Bitcoin was only just changed to allow it

What "feature" was recently added? This has always been a problem with BTC.

<comment><USER9> Replace by fee. Zero-confirmation transactions have always been insecure; replace-by-fee is essentially Firesheep for this vulnerability -- it puts a friendly UI on it and drops the technical acumen required from "substantial -- you probably have to write your own complicated C++ code" to "you have to be willing to lie; that's it."

(Replace by fee in a nutshell: All Bitcoin transactions are unstable for a period of time, generally believed to be "approximately 60 minutes." Exploiting this instability to retroactively invalidate a transaction was possible but beyond the ken of casual attackers. Replace by fee lets you reverse any transaction you made younger than N minutes by simply saying "I'm willing to outbid the fee I offered on that transaction. The new transaction does this new thing, for example replacing the $100 transaction 'pay from my left pocket to restaurant for dinner' into 'pay from my left pocket to my right pocket.'")

<comment><USER53> Wasn't this always the case? The higher miner tip would get picked up.

<comment><USER54> Not really, it used to be that they would just pick the first non-conflicting transaction they saw, although iirc that wasn't a "rule of the protocol" so much as how-the-software-worked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Fascinating. I don't even _like_ Bitcoin, and this managed to make me feel kind of sad.

</comment><comment><USER56> > Still, all is not yet lost. Despite everything that has happened, in the > past few weeks more members of the community have started picking things up > from where I am putting them down. Where making an alternative to Core was > once seen as renegade, there are now two more forks vying for attention > (Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin Unlimited). So far they've hit the same > problems as XT but it's possible a fresh set of faces could find a way to > make progress.

</comment><comment><USER57> I have no experience with Bitcoin or its community - so apologies if the following is naive - but some parts of this article make no sense for me.

For events to have taken place like described in the article, several parties would have been required to work together with the common goal of keeping the blocksize restriction in place:

The Chinese miners who hold the majority of the hashing power, the developers of Bitcoin Core, the admins of bitcoin.org and the as of now unidentified operators of the DDOS attacks.

If you assume it's not a conspiracy, then each party must have reasons why such a decision would be desirable. But as the author describes it, there are no reasons. This goal wouldn't just push Bitcoin into a questionable direction, it would be downright suicidal: Over time, Bitcoin would become unusable for any kind of transaction. Not even the greedy miners could want a cryptocurrency that no one uses.

So I think there has to be some upside to the blocksize restriction. If anyone has more info on that, I'd be happy to know.

</comment><comment><USER58> The network is being used to capacity and fees are being determined by a market, which values capacity at an increasing premium! What a failure! (sarcasm intended)

Hearn's post may be technically accurate in terms of the data he's collected. But the conclusions he draws are not correct. Usually in any entrepreneurial project, the fact that the service is over-subscribed and increasingly valuable is a sign of success. If one views bitcoin as an open-source project which should have some ideal technical implementation, then yes Hearn has failed to convince everyone to run his preferred implementation of bitcoin, or to agree on exclusively running a different protocol that is not bitcoin while calling it bitcoin.

There is plenty of room for Hearn to run a bitcoinXT altcoin. The only failure here is one of logic, forced by the concept that there can be only one successful network based on nakamoto consensus protocol, and that that network must either be bitcoin or a replacement bitcoin which supplants the original.

</comment><comment><USER59> I think the doom a gloom is overdone because the "handful of guys sitting on a single stage" who control 95% of hashing power have a massive incentive not to destroy their main asset.

</comment><comment><USER60> OK, if Bitcoin has just about failed, what's the best alternative cryptocurrency?

<comment><USER44> In all seriousness? Dogecoin. It's a joke currency, but that's precisely why it's good. It has an inflationary economic model (so slightly more practical than Bitcoin) and people don't take it too seriously.

<comment><USER60> OK, so I meant "best" in the sense of likely to become widely accepted, at least online. Do any VPN services or VPS hosters accept Dogecoin?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I am curious if the DDoS attacks mentioned in the article are in any way correlated to Linode's recent downtime ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10806686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10806686)). The timing fits...

</comment><comment><USER62> If true then I hope that the next XXXcoin cost of work function is more geared toward something inherently useful like protein folding or a more general purpose problem like simulating cell interactions?

</comment><comment><USER63> Cross post from the NYT article comment:

In open source communities, impactful contributions yield influence. Here are the top 100 bitcoin contributors: [https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/graphs/contributors)

Guys like Wladimir, Pieter, Gavin, Cory Fields, Gregory Maxwell and Luke Jr have a voice because they've contributed many thousands of lines of code. (Lines of code are only a proxy for impact).

You may have noticed Mike Hearn isn't in the top 100 contributors list. He is the primary author of the Java implementation of a bitcoin library: [https://github.com/bitcoinj/bitcoinj](https://github.com/bitcoinj/bitcoinj)

He started it in 2011, definitely early. But a substantial amount of bitcoin core work had already set the path. There are also similar implementations in many different languages but they are not the primary reference implementation for full nodes.

According to Hearn's blog post: "I've talked about Bitcoin on Sky TV and BBC News. I have been repeatedly cited by the Economist as a Bitcoin expert and prominent developer. I have explained Bitcoin to the SEC, to bankers and to ordinary people I met at cafes."

Being cited by journalists is not the same as being a primary contributor.

The disagreement between Hearn and the other developers isn't about whether to increase capacity, it's about _how_. Many of the primary full-node contributors believe a hard-blockchain-fork is a risky approach. Lots of work is being done to explore better options, like segregated witness ([http://gavinandresen.ninja/segregated-witness-is- cool](http://gavinandresen.ninja/segregated-witness-is-cool)).

Mike Hearn tried to (very aggressively) push the idea of increasing the block size with a hard fork. In fact the patch allows node operators to vote and 75% adoption is needed. When it looked like that wasn't going to pan out, he created Bitcoin XT where "Decisions are made through agreement between Mike and Gavin, with Mike making the final call if a serious dispute were to arise."

So the claim that Hearn not being able to take over decision making power for the bitcoin community is evidence that bitcoin has failed seems to show something slightly different. It shows that open source software methodology of forking and adoption lets the best implementation win and prevents hostile takeovers.

Mike Hearn is not as impactful to bitcoin development as he or recent news would indicate. Mike leaving the bitcoin community has little impact on the future success or failure of bitcoin.

<comment><USER64> > You may have noticed Mike Hearn isn't in the top 100 contributors list.

I've also noticed, there are no any Satoshi Nakomotos in the list of contributors. Does that mean he (Satoshi) was "not impactful to the development"?

P.S.: I'm not following the Bitcoin news. Is Satoshi a nickname of one of those top contributors or the initial author just didn't use version control system? Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER63> Yeah I was using that as a transition to talk about Mike's other contributions. His bitcoinj contributions are hundreds of thousands of lines. Also I said "Lines of code are only a proxy for impact" and unfortunately there's probably no realistic measure.

I'm not a bitcoind contributor and this is more of a generic observation about how open source projects are controlled in general.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Pretty good article, and a great overview of the blocksize controversy.

Also a great exhibit of some stereotypical programmer social problems; we don't get a lot of middle ground, most programmers are either openly hostile and combative _or_ so deathly afraid of confrontation and responsibility that they give away their authority so that they don't have to handle the pressure. Gavin should've kept control. Bitcoin is learning exactly why a strong central authority is so desirable in money exchange: it keeps the value of the currency stable by preventing panic and confusion over issues like this.

Many discussions of Bitcoin claim that this power is transferred to "the network" to make the final decision, which sounds very egalitarian and democratic, but Bitcoin failed to provide the controls that would prevent power hoarding and ensure that the people who depend on bitcoin were fairly represented. This is one reason why modern democracies are structured within the framework of a republic. This is probably one of bitcon's hardest to solve problems, since the hardware to get respectable hashrates is unobtainable for quite literally everyone who doesn't have access to their own microfabrication facilities. Even if one of the specialty bitcoin hardware makers had a really good, cheap chip, why would they share it? They'd hoard all the hashpower for themselves. Litecoin attempts to address this by hasing with scrypt, under the belief that it's harder to hoard power with custom hardware if the algorithm uses a lot of processing power _and_ memory instead of just a lot of processing power.

Mike failed to mention one incentive that exists to prevent increasing the block size: miners get the transaction fees attached to each block they mine. If the block size is large, there is little contention for space in the blocks, and ergo there is not much reason to incentivize miners to include _your_ transaction in the next block. By keeping the artificial constraint on the block size, people who own a lot of hash power will be gaining a lot more bitcoin for themselves.

I don't think this crisis is insurmountable. So much money has been sunk into bitcoin that I can't believe people are just going to let this cabal take it out. BitcoinXT will gain notoriety through the mainstream press and the resultant sell off among casual investors will freak the big players out and force them into running XT nodes.

<comment><USER66> > Mike failed to mention one incentive that exists to prevent increasing the > block size: miners get the transaction fees attached to each block they > mine. If the block size is large, there is little contention for space in > the blocks, and ergo there is not much reason to incentivize miners to > include your transaction in the next block. By keeping the artificial > constraint on the block size, people who own a lot of hash power will be > gaining a lot more bitcoin

If the blocks are bigger, doesn't that mean they can hold more transactions and thus get more fees total? Or are you assuming the relative scarcity of transaction space would push fees high enough to overcome that?

<comment><USER65> >are you assuming the relative scarcity of transaction space would push fees high enough to overcome that?

Yes.

The blocks always contain approximately 10 minutes' worth of transactions because the network periodically adjusts mining difficulty to approximate that target.

Right now, the issue is that there are times when 10 minutes' worth of bitcoin transactions are occupying more than 1MB of space in the completed blocks, which means a processing backlog is formed. Miners prioritize transactions by their attached transaction fee, since they get that fee if they find the block. Thus, users are effectively placing a bid for the network hash power to verify their transaction.

When a backlog forms, customers that want their transaction processed quickly have to outbid others to get a miner to start working on it. If there's not a backlog, their transaction will be included with only a token fee attached because something is better than nothing. Going from 1MB to 8MB means that bitcoin would need 8x more transaction volume per 10 minute block to get back into a transaction backlog, which is the only time that users will attach a meaningful transaction fee to their transactions.

So if the block size goes up from 1MB to 8MB today, there will still be a block every ten minutes, but since transaction volume will presumably remain nearly the same, space in each block won't be scarce and the bidding war won't take off. It'd be a long time before we got back into the same predicament, meaning miners would have to wait a lot longer to start collecting meaningful transaction fees. That's why some people with heavy investments in mining want to keep the block size artificially low: they're trying to instigate a bidding war for their hash power.

It should be noted that this eventuality was always part of bitcoin's design. Bitcoin is programmed to stop "minting" around 22 million coins. At that time, the network will not issue any reward to the miners that find a block (the reward will cut itself down until that number is reached, targeted for approximately 2022 iirc). The solution to this has always been "users will have to incentivize miners with transaction fees".

It's just that the assumption was always that we wouldn't have to deal with that until the network itself stopped attaching rewards to mining. In practice, however, we're in that situation now due to the artificial constraint on the size of a block (which, afaik, is mostly accidental and was never intended to be permanent). The debate is over whether bitcoin should remove the artificial block size constraint and keep its fees negligibly low or whether it should keep the constraint and "allow" miners to start charging more for processing transactions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> "Why has the capacity limit not been raised? Because the block chain is controlled by Chinese miners"

The author is complaining that Bitcoin is working exactly as designed.

From Satoshi's paper: "Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it."

If you want to raise the block size, out-vote the Chinese miners.

<comment><USER9> You cannot simply out-vote the Chinese miners on the issue of the so-called protocol: you need to convince the Bitcoin "economic majority" to accept a change to the codebase that everyone uses to verify the blockchain, otherwise you're effectively mining a very expensive altcoin which no merchants or exchanges accept. (An altcoin is a cryptocurrency that generally captures every feature of Bitcoin except being called Bitcoin.)

The economic majority on Bitcoin has basically said "We're terrified of what happens if we de-throne Bitcoin Core, which is the lineal descendant of the Satoshi client. Accordingly, we'll go along with whatever that project decides." The problems with Bitcoin Core's decisionmaking process are in the post. Worth noting, since I don't recall seeing it: Bitcoin Core is operated by "consensus" with respect to this issue and any of five devs can blackball a change; three of the devs work for a company whose economic justification for existing is "the Bitcoin network is inadequate to do the things that many users want Bitcoin to do." Fixing Bitcoin Core would harm their economic interests at the new company they founded.

Why be terrified of de-throning Bitcoin Core? Isn't it a protocol with multiple competing implementations? NO, because the "Bitcoin protocol" does not exist -- Bitcoin is a network of nodes running one C++ codebase _and that is essentially the entire ballgame._ Bitcoin's requirement for distributed consensus means that if you are not bug-for-bug compatible with Bitcoin Core, which runs a supermajority of the network, you risk being catastrophically forked from the network at any time of an attacker's choosing.

Also, the scenario where some economic players remain on Bitcoin Core and some economic players migrate to Bitcoin Better, followed by a hard fork (irreconcilable split of the blockchains regarded as authoritative by these two incompatible software ecosystems), results in loss of the global non- technical consensus in what a "Bitcoin" actually is. You'll find that your "Bitcoins" might not be actually useable at a merchant who accepts "Bitcoins." You might find a payment made to you in "Bitcoins", which your wallet says happened, has not actually happened according to your payment processor. Cats and dogs living together; catastrophe happens; the price of Bitcoin Core coins and Bitcoin Better coins both approaches the natural value of Bitcoin, which is zero.

<comment><USER67> > otherwise you're effectively mining a very expensive altcoin which no > merchants or exchanges accept.

This is not the case. You could run XT for example and remain compatible, which was precisely its adoption strategy? It just simply did not reach consensus (aka CPU power).

> By mining with Bitcoin XT you will produce blocks with a new version number. > This indicates to the rest of the network that you support larger blocks. > When 75% of the blocks are new-version blocks, a decision has been reached > to start building larger blocks that will be rejected by Bitcoin Core nodes.

(from [https://bitcoinxt.software/](https://bitcoinxt.software/))

<comment><USER9> That's BitcoinXT's protocol, sure, but that isn't Bitcoin Core's "protocol", so the powers that be can simply say "We do not accept your attempt to reject our reality and substitute your own."

<comment><USER67> The powers that be are the CPUs. If XT had reached its goal of 75% mining votes by versioning blocks, today it'd be what you call the "protocol".

<comment><USER68> But _who_ calls it the protocol? Let's pretend this fork happens. Someone goes to bitcoin.org and download the software called bitcoin and runs it, and they won't be using that protocol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> It's been a good run with a lot of interesting observations. Upcoming iterations will likely solve a lot of the (truly compelling) problems that bitcoin failed to solve.

This "people problem," as Mike calls it, is undoubtedly a result of the mechanics of the blockchain. Slightly different rules may lead to dramatically different (and less insurmountable) people problems.

</comment><comment><USER70> "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

\- Gotta say, even if bitcoin "fails" I don't feel it will be a "failure". The community and people have learnt so much, I mean, Bitcoin became...big and it's the first cryptocurrency to reach this level.

To have made a perfect system would be unrealistic really.

</comment><comment><USER71> Bitcoin was always going to fail one way or the other. I expected it to be power usage, but I should have anticipated bog-standard Open Source infighting. I'm hoping the idea of a decentralized electronic ledger and programmable currency doesn't die with it.

</comment><comment><USER72> It's all fun, games, and ideology. That is, until money is involved. What a shame.

</comment><comment><USER73> With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps what should have happened is that the original 5 developers should have each maintained their own compatible fork of the codebase, cross-sharing patches they agreed on.

<comment><USER66> That's basically what the Bitcoin XT fork mentioned in the article is. The developers who thought it was a good idea to increase the block size limit increased it and released the client.

When enough people are using it it will end up being the official block chain and the versions that don't support these larger blocks will filter away as they become useless.

There are two problems with this approach. First, as mentioned in the article, people applied outside pressure such as DDOSes to force people to not use the alternate software.

Second is simple confidence. While the fork is an unsettled question you can end up with two diverging blockchains. This makes it uncertain whether someone has successfully made a payment or not, and introduces the possibility of double spending. All that uncertainty is likely to hurt the adoption of bitcoin, possibly causing irreparable damage to its reputation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I'm inclined to blame the author's negativity on his obvious conflict of interest.

At least, my understanding is that he recently began working for a group that competes with Bitcoin in trying to connect traditional banks and (non-Bitcoin) blockchain technology. He has an incentive to scare people away from Bitcoin.

Not saying there are no scaling/social/whatever issues in Bitcoin. But the author seems to be conflicted.

Disclaimer: I own a few Bitcoins, and thus hold the opposite conflict of interest.

</comment><comment><USER75> Linkbait-ish template of the article takes away from otherwise promising technical content.

Typical template of building up hype linkbait case - start with a couple of puffed up credentials, pose yourself like a well wishing visionary and then shed few crocodile tears of sadness over "it failed" statements which of course conveying an absolute truth.

Nothing helps to share links better than controversy.

</comment><comment><USER76> It is rather naive assumption that valuable assets (and bitcoin is a digital asset, not digital currency) would not be seized by elites, because very essence of elitism is the ability to sieze and control distribution of valuable assets, be it Chinese govt or too big to fail US financial institutions.

</comment><comment><USER77> I didn't really understand how the block size is an issue, and what could happen if it was hit.

Although is it true that if there are 2 large network which are separated (by the great firewall), does that mean the ledger could be split in 2 ?

</comment><comment><USER78> Somewhat relatable article: [http://hardforkit.com/2016/01/12/Thoughts-On-How- Bitcoin-Dev...](http://hardforkit.com/2016/01/12/Thoughts-On-How-Bitcoin- Development-Is-Evolving.html)

</comment><comment><USER79> Of all the Bitcoin people, Mike Hearn is the guy who is respect the most. He is the only one who could see the picture objectively and not get carried away by fanaticism. Even very early circa, 2010, he was always a voice of reason amongst insanity.

</comment><comment><USER80> Today we could redo bitcoin, as a centralized perfectly trustworthy system :

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption#The_2nd...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption#The_2nd_generation_of_homomorphic_cryptosystems)

Simply have 5 servers running that as a network server and you won't need proof of work, nor will you need a blockchain. Homomorphically encrypt a basic ledger with an encrypted backend, and throw away the key. Done/done.

One might say encrypting 52 integers in 36 hours is somewhat less than acceptable performance, but how does it really compare to bitcoin in total effort ? This is certainly good enough that anyone with a decent pc could run it. Hell, you might even reward them for running it just like bitcoin does. And it ought to be a lot cheaper to run than bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER81> I wonder whether there could be a hierarchy of transactions (like credit cards, banks, and cross-bank transactions). I.e. not requiring the entirety of transactions to be present in the top blockchain.

</comment><comment><USER82> Bitcoin's potential got ruined by the Chinese speculators. In the West, on the contrary, people oversold expectations. I really want back the slow, but steady growth before the boom days!

</comment><comment><USER63> In open source communities, impactful contributions yield influence. Here are the top 100 bitcoin contributors: [https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/graphs/contributors)

Guys like Wladimir, Pieter, Gavin, Cory Fields, Gregory Maxwell and Luke Jr have a voice because they've contributed many thousands of lines of code. (Lines of code are only a proxy for impact).

You may have noticed Mike Hearn isn't in the top 100 contributors list. He is the primary author of the Java implementation of a bitcoin library: [https://github.com/bitcoinj/bitcoinj](https://github.com/bitcoinj/bitcoinj)

He started it in 2011, definitely early. But a substantial amount of bitcoin core work had already set the path. There are also similar implementations in many different languages but they are not the primary reference implementation for full nodes.

According to Hearn's blog post: "I've talked about Bitcoin on Sky TV and BBC News. I have been repeatedly cited by the Economist as a Bitcoin expert and prominent developer. I have explained Bitcoin to the SEC, to bankers and to ordinary people I met at cafes."

Being cited by journalists is not the same as being a primary contributor.

The disagreement between Hearn and the other developers isn't about whether to increase capacity, it's about _how_. Many of the primary full-node contributors believe a hard-blockchain-fork is a risky approach. Lots of work is being done to explore better options, like segregated witness ([http://gavinandresen.ninja/segregated-witness-is- cool](http://gavinandresen.ninja/segregated-witness-is-cool)).

Mike Hearn tried to (very aggressively) push the idea of increasing the block size with a hard fork. In fact the patch allows node operators to vote and 75% adoption is needed. When it looked like that wasn't going to pan out, he created Bitcoin XT where "Decisions are made through agreement between Mike and Gavin, with Mike making the final call if a serious dispute were to arise."

So the claim that Hearn not being able to take over decision making power for the bitcoin community is evidence that bitcoin has failed seems to show something slightly different. It shows that open source software methodology of forking and adoption lets the best implementation win and prevents hostile takeovers.

Mike Hearn is not as impactful to bitcoin development as he or recent news would indicate. Mike leaving the bitcoin community has little impact on the future success or failure of bitcoin.

<comment><USER83> To be clear, Mike Hearn's unilateral fork doesn't switch over to the new rules when 75% adoption is achieved, or even when 75% of mining is done by supporters - it switches when 75% of the last 1000 blocks indicate support, which can quite easily happen with less than 75% support just by random chance. This is an astonishingly aggressive threshold, and if he succeeded it's almost certain that Bitcoin would fork into two different, conflicting versions of the transaction history for a substantial length of time.

<comment><USER84> The random chance is very very low. For simplicity, let's say that 50% of the hashing power agree and 50% of the hashing power disagree. Then the probability of getting 750 blocks is 7*10^-59 ( [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+distribution+n...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+distribution+n%3D1000%2C+p%3D0.5%2C+at+least+750+success) ) There are approximately 50000 blocks in a year, so the expected time is a lot of millions of years.

This changes when most of the hash power agree. If the 74% agree then the chances are 24% ( [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+distribution+n...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=binomial+distribution+n%3D1000%2C+p%3D0.74%2C+at+least+750+success) ). The calculation is more complicated because the intervals may overlap, but this would take less than a year.

So, when more than 70% of the hash power agree, it's time to upgrade, but 70% is a clear majority.

(Just for curiosity: With 75% hash power you get a 52% chance. With 76% hash power you get a 78% chance.)

<comment><USER21> This calculation doesn't address the arbitrary nature of the threshold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> What I don't understand is why hard fork is bad or why people oppose it? Isn't competition a good thing?

<comment><USER86> Then it's no longer BTC, it's something else (completely separate networks).

<comment><USER85> Yes-yes I understand that. There could be two networks: bitcoin and bitcoinxt. And people could choose between the two. So why is that bad? I am asking genuinely

<comment><USER86> There are tons of alt-coins. Am I missing something?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> I didn't trust BC as far as I could throw a truck. Good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER88> This was posted in the duplicate thread:

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

There are three types of people who are into Bitcoin:

1\. People who are in it out of sheer curiosity.

2\. People who are in it to get rich quick.

3\. People who have been scammed into it.

The people who are in it out of curiosity are the people I don't take issue with. At its beginnings, I found Bitcoin to be a curious thing because it was a novel and new idea. However, as things progressed and I learnt more about how it all worked, I saw it as a cumbersome idea that wouldn't effectively replace anything and as a result now I'd rather make jokes about it than take anything about it seriously. I've never spent more than $20 CAD on Bitcoin and I have gotten it all back for that matter too.

People who get scammed into Bitcoin typically get scammed either one of two ways: they're either being coerced into using it because they've gotten something like malware on their machines (CryptoWall and its variants) or they see it as an investment alternative. The only times I've ever seen non- technical people experience Bitcoin is when I have to tell them that the malware on their computers will only release their unbacked-up data requires a payment using the cryptocurrency to get it all back. And that is really what a non-technical person's experience with Bitcoin is going to be: it's a way to pay thieves.

As for the get rich quick people, they tend to fall into the third category or they themselves are scammers.

Right now there are two forces dominating the Bitcoin community: the miners and those who are holding out on whatever magical unicorn rainbows makes the coins have value. The miners don't want to see changes to the software because it'll hurt their bottom line and the people holding and exchanging it want to see these changes so they can benefit. So as a result, Bitcoin has entered a war of attrition and is starting to show its problems. Mike Hearn's leaving is definitely a consequence of this problem.

Earlier yesterday [1], I made a quip about how it's insulting to suggest that we get those who are "unbanked" as a result of living at no-fixed-address (ie: "homeless") should eventually move on to Bitcoin as an alternative to mainstream financial institutions. It's really for the reasons that Hearn made: would you want to wait a random period of time ranging from maybe a few minutes to a few hours for your transaction to go through? It's already insulting enough that they're living at the bottom of society, so why would we want to get them to use a bottom-tier financial system? Why not instead suggest making it easier for them to participate within mainstream banking schemes?

I anticipate based on my last remarks that the responses to this post will consist of feckless anecdotes and pointless accusations that I and others have a "problem" with Bitcoin. I guess to a certain extent the statement of me having a problem is true, but at the end of the day Hearn is right.

Bitcoin is a failure and if you invested into it then you're getting what you deserve. If you think that it isn't a failure then you obviously didn't comprehend Hearn's writing.

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10898408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10898408)

<comment><USER89> What about the people who know just enough to be both sour and aggressively, passionately wrong when they seek validation from other people about how bitcoin 'has failed'.

Bitcoin is literally working right now. I order food with it, avoid currency conversions with it, buy blankets with it...

When people say it has failed it is pretty obvious they have some sort of emotional investment and are not objective.

<comment><USER90> The Zimbabwe Dollar was literally working in the sense you mean it too. You could buy goods like bread with trillions of it, etc. So I think a currency's definition of success is more than that.

<comment><USER89> The Zimbabwe dollar was centrally controlled by a government which was printing it as fast as they could, and it only worked under the most extreme cases. Anyone holding any amount of dollar would see it's value destroyed by the government who was in sole control.

In any event he said 'bitcoin has failed' which is ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> This is Mike Hearn.

[https://lobste.rs/s/82pz7r/curated_links_to_understand_dange...](https://lobste.rs/s/82pz7r/curated_links_to_understand_dangers_of_bitcoinxt)

<comment><AUTHOR> This a pretty rude comment. My comment didn't make an argument either way; it just added some context to the thread. You're arguing so aggressively that you've hijacked it in order to slam him.

Could you maybe delete that comment and make it a top-level comment instead? Then I'll delete this one, and the thread will be cleaner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> please stop saying 'BitCoin'. It's Bitcoin.

<comment><USER39> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906561](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10906561) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Just another reason to isolate our Internet from China.

<comment><USER94> I don't think an isolated internet is the solution. That's what North Korea has (to the extent they have internet), and it is a problem in every way. The problem isn't really China, it's there are only a handful of people with the keys to this castle.

<comment><USER38> An Internet for everyone except China and North Korea is hardly the same thing as an Internet just for North Korea.

<comment><USER95> Excluding North Korea is a bit different than excluding a sixth of the world (China), though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> I am shocked to hear that the techno-libertarian goldbuggery scheme didn't work out well.

</comment><comment><USER97> Need something like npm. Open semantic modules and you vote on modules with your feet. Use something like web assembly (which is actually an abstract syntax tree format) and you get support for many programming languages and architectures.

</comment><comment><USER98> I am not surprised to see this first attempt at radically changing how we think of currency is having trouble. I'm surprised that the Winklevoss Twins bought so heavily into it. Hopefully the investors in this industry can take the reigns away from China.

[http://fortune.com/2015/10/05/gemini-winklevoss- bitcoin/](http://fortune.com/2015/10/05/gemini-winklevoss-bitcoin/)

<comment><USER99> It's kinda sad, but it's gotten to the point that heavyweight players are going to be needed to fix the problem.

I just really hope that the banks either don't figure out how to make everything go in their favor, or that the hands they play work out for the good of everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> It seems like powerful people in the ecosystem (Chinese miners?) _really_ do not want the block size increased.

Why would this be? Are they hoping for increasing transaction fees and therefore increasing mining profits?

In any case increasing the block size seems like a no brainer from a technical point of view, at least if your interest is in Bitcoin itself and its growth and future.

<comment><USER93> Did you read the article? The author explicitly explains why Chinese miners don't want the block size increased.

<comment><USER100> Must have missed that important point somehow. Will take another look.

Edit: oh, that. Not much of an explanation. I was asking if there is a deeper underlying reason.

<comment><USER101> Basically, the Chinese miners don't want to increase the blocksize because they are very bandwidth-limited.

Larger blocks mean longer propagation time, during which time another pool with more bandwidth could hash and propagate their own block, causing the Chinese block to be orphaned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> > _But Bitcoin Core is an open source project, not a company._

It has some of the shape of an unincorporated association, though. There's a lot of caselaw dealing with disputes arising in those, usually from reluctant courts that were dragged into particularly petty and poisonous disputes.

Given the amount of actual money involved, people might start asking courts to settle some of these questions before too long.

(But don't ask me to do it, I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice).

</comment><comment><USER103> As an outsider, the only thing I can take from this is a certain sad feeling that it's a demonstration of a pure wild west unregulated and uncontrolled economy devolving into utter tyranny. You've got your oligarchs, your civil war, your rent seeking, and maybe you'll end up in a year or two with an outright winner. At which point that winner might as well cancel bitcoin, declare themself king and issue a central coinage.

Well, that and "Bitcoin has become garbage, avoid at all costs".</comment>


Automatically committing code that passes its tests, while deleting what fails - <AUTHOR> https://increment.com/testing/testing-the-boundaries-of-collaboration/ <comment><AUTHOR> Re-submitting this with a different title because I think the article is really interesting, but the original title didn't seem to attract many readers (or maybe it was just bad timing)</comment>


AI These Lyrics Do Not Exist - <AUTHOR> https://TheseLyricsDoNotExist.com <comment><AUTHOR> Input:

      robot

Output:

      I wish I was a robot
      Oh if I was a robot
      Mind as a robot
      Parts as a robot

      Sometimes I feel like a robot
      I just need a safe zone to run
      Get on you knees and do the robot hum
      Oh, say robot hum

      I am a tool of this technology
      Talking through my ears

      Technology has got the upper hand
      So now we live on a hard drive</comment>